 I'm Andres Martinez. I'm a vice president here at New America. And I want to tell you that this past long weekend, I had a very nice break in Cancun with my son, which is why my ears are a little bit more red, rather than usual. And I've been thinking about the motion before us tonight about the role of technologies in our lives and the extent to which they have either enriched or taken over in a less positive way our lives. I was thinking about this trip because, you know, Sebastian, my son, and I, we stayed at a resort that I knew in advance would meet all of our expectations. They had a lot of great kid activities. It was located across from a shopping plaza that had great taco joints. And of course, I knew all this beforehand because I wouldn't think these days of booking a hotel without doing my research in advance, without going on Expedia and benefiting from the wisdom of those who have gone before me. I kind of knew what I was getting myself into. I knew that this Western that we stayed in was far from the nicest place in Cancun, far from the most expensive, far from the most luxurious. But I knew that it really kind of exceeds or meets people's expectations by and large. And I knew what I was getting myself into. I also can thank my smartphone for letting us know in advance the day we flew out that the flight was going to be a little bit delayed. And I knew which gate to go to when I was at Dallas. GPS also helped me get to Dallas, I should add, because I recently moved to Alexandria and still have a bit of a hard time finding my way to Dallas from my new home. So I used GPS to get there. And then once in Cancun, I also realized that I was going to miss out on two hugely important TV events while I was gone. The season finale of Downton Abbey and the Arsenal Fire and Munich European Champions League match, which was played yesterday when I was flying back. So I went online and ordered my T-Vote to record these things on Direct TV. By the way, both events ended terribly. So afterwards over a drink, we can commiserate on the finale to Downton. I was also able to use a smartphone to relay to Sebastian's mother that we had arrived OK and for them to communicate during our trip. I was able to withdraw pesos on my ATM card as soon as we landed, read reviews of all the restaurants we wanted to go to. And then the funny thing is on one of the nights after my eight-year-old son had gone to sleep, I sat out on the balcony, listened to the waves crashing, and caught up on Facebook, which I hadn't done in a while. And I was able to see lots of pictures of cats and dogs and babies posted by friends and family. So I felt more connected paradoxically with friends and family on vacation far away, because I had this time carved out to catch up. And because I'm kind of a geek at heart and have a hard time kind of shutting down while on vacation, I also on Sunday checked my Twitter feed and the New York Times app to get the latest on immigration reform debates happening in Washington. There were some developments over the weekend. And I felt like I had watched the Sunday talk shows myself sitting there in Cancun. And as I'm thinking about this four-day midwinter break, I'm wondering, what would this all have been like in, say, the early 1970s when I was my son's age? Obviously, things would have been quite different. And I don't just mean that the SPF factor on the sunscreen would have been a lot lower or my collars would have been a lot bigger. I would have had to make my peace with missing out on these TV events, unless I haven't had one of the very first VCR models. I think they came out in that time frame of the early-mid-70s. And I wouldn't have been able to magically access local currency anywhere in the world with this card I carry in my wallet. I would have had to go to a bank during banking hours and withdraw on dollars and then sit in another line when I got to the country where I was traveling to exchange that into local currency. The only way I would have been able to communicate with anyone back here would have been to sit by the phone in the hotel and hope that we would be in the room when somebody made in a very expensive phone call. There would have been no checking in for instant analyses of news developments back here, certainly not for free. And the other thing I forgot to mention was I downloaded a book onto my Kindle at the LIS. I had this last minute, a good friend of mine edited a book that's doing quite well. I should read it, and I was able to download it on my Kindle. None of that would have happened. And of course, I would not have known that much about the hotel in advance, the restaurants we were going to go to. I wouldn't have been able to do any of that or catch up with friends and family on something like Facebook. I would have been more disconnected. So all of these technologies, and I'm sure all of you can think of something within the last month that would have been revolutionarily different a couple of decades ago, just like this. In terms of our ability now to transcend the moment and our sort of relationship to time and space now is astonishing. These technologies have enabled us to do so much more wherever, whenever. It's hard to imagine why we're here even having this debate. Who wouldn't want to be so empowered and so informed? How could more, more information, more contact, more options ever be less? I think of most of you might already sense that there might be an answer to that question. And when I think back at my nice four-day break, I could argue maybe it would have been slightly more relaxing if I had taken my down. If I had not taken that downtime to catch up with friends and family back here or felt that I could still plug into the new cycle here. And maybe there's something to be said for the serendipity that would have been more part of the experience if we had just stumbled on Places T without having this advance intel and being able to benefit, again, from those who had gone before us with these very precise, numerical ratings. I knew the hotel I was going at was a 4.6 on Expedion. That's fantastic. Maybe there's something to be said for winging it. Maybe that's part of the human experience. And of course, it's also easy to overstate the contrast between now and the early 70s. There are some less technologically advanced functional equivalents that we could have, back then, I could have talked to a travel agent in advance of my trip. I could have bought a photo's guide to Mexico and gotten some of the information, although it wouldn't have had sort of the same kind of crowds sourcing potency. And when I thought of that, I thought that a guidebook is actually a pretty apt stand-in for a lot of what we're going to be talking about here today. The pros and cons of having all the successful information mediate our interactions with our surroundings. This amalgam of social media, GPS-enabled features and apps that make our everyday lives serve the functional equivalent of these old guidebooks. I was thinking about that a lot, and that's this trade-off between knowledge of your surroundings and the serendipity that comes with everyday life. I was reading about guidebooks a little bit, and there was an American artist and writer named William Wetmore's story, who in the 1860s kind of made fun of the grand tour of Europe that a lot of Englishmen of a certain class would take. And he said, every Englishman abroad carries a Murray for information. And this was an old type of guidebook, kind of like Betteker's or the Blue Guide. A Murray for information and a Byron for sentiment. So the poetry of Byron, because that's what you're supposed to feel if you're English and you go off to Italy, and finds out by them what he is to know and feel by every step. And so, again, it's this sort of mediating of experience. So I'm dwelling a little bit on why we're posing these questions, because a lot of the benefits I feel to our technologies are perhaps more self-evident. So this is the question before us. Has our smartphone, as our smartphone has become the equivalent of a guidebook to everyday life by being able to access all the people you know and their wisdom about everything that surrounds you? Has it ultimately enriched your life? Or is it also, and perhaps at the end of the day, ultimately devaluing some of what it means to be human? So the motion before us tonight is, your smartphone has hijacked your life. And we're very privileged to have with us to wrestle over this motion these four individuals, whom I will very quickly introduce so we can get started. We have, arguing for the motion, Christine Rosen. Christine is a Bernard Schwartz Fellow here at the New America Foundation, working on her forthcoming book, The Extinction of Experience. So you can tell just by that why she's arguing for the motion. She's also a senior editor for the New Atlantis, where she writes about the social and cultural impact of technology. We have, to her left, Professor Daniel Sirowitz, who's the co-director of the consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes at our partner, Arizona State University. Daniel is based here in Washington. His research focuses on revealing the connections between science policy, making scientific research, and social outcomes. Now arguing against the motion, we have, to my immediate left, Marvin Amore, who's also a Schwartz Fellow here at the New America Foundation, working on a book that looks at the First Amendment in the 21st century. Marvin is a very, I was going to say well-known, but he's more than that. He's a very broad-ranging, interesting First Amendment lawyer known for his advocacy on a range of copyright, internet freedom, network neutrality issues. He just wrote a great book on internet freedom, which is an e-book published last month, this month, last month. Marvin is sort of the father of Internet Freedom Day, which we recently observed. And to his left, we have Miriam Warren, who is the vice president of New Markets at Yelp. So she's overseeing the company's international expansion, including recent launches throughout Europe. So Miriam obviously has a passionate interest in the subject tonight, as well as a sort of commercial involvement in it. Yelp is very much at the core of what we're talking about when we talk about the pros and cons of mediating our experience. So I think that takes care of the framing of the issue. Please enjoy this and have some refreshments while we're debating. Yes, there are more chairs up front. Thank you, Marvin. More chairs, don't be shy if you'd like to come up front and have a seat. The way this is going to proceed is each one of the participants will have seven minutes to open. Then we're going to have a 30-minute mediated free for all, where both sides will be able to challenge each other, and then we're going to have two minute closings. So thank you for coming again. Enjoy. First off, arguing for the motion is Dan Sarowitz. Thanks, Andreas. Let me begin by saying that this whole notion of a debate with a yes or no vote around a question that's complicated is part of the problem. And let me follow up by saying that your confessions about your trip to Cancun are pretty pathetic, Andreas. But it's good that you've taken the first step and acknowledged that there's a problem, OK, that you're powerless to resolve. That the moment you and your date finish ordering dinner, you pull out your smartphones and start texting so you don't have to deal with the awkward silence that might actually emerge. That you've come to believe that you've more or less actually read War and Peace because you read the summary on Wikipedia. That you find out what your kid is up to, not by talking to them, but by obsessively following their Facebook page. That at work, you simply can't go more than 10 minutes without surreptitiously checking your email. And then if there aren't any new messages, you feel like a loser. That you're always taking pictures of yourself with your friends so you can check on how good you look. That you cheat at crossword puzzles and that even though you're married, you're always assessing your market value on match.com, doesn't count as cheating. OK, but let's think of the upsides. Andreas went through a lot of these already. You can never get lost anymore You always know how to pack for wherever it is you're going. Fewer mediocre meals, fewer hotels with lousy service, no ticket lines for movies, no need for pickup lines at bars or excruciating intro Q&As at parties, no risk of boredom as you play Temple Run or check the stock market on your way between Farragut North and Dupont Circle. Gone is the frustration of not being able to identify the song you're hearing or the inadequacy of not knowing the meaning of the acronym that the smart aleck and this cubicle next door used at the staff meeting yesterday. Instant expertise on every subject and all the data you could imagine to back up your own personal convictions about the evil of gluten. Deliver to your brain in predigested paragraphs. Camera at the ready for every photo op. Voice recorder for every idea that pops into your head and out of your mouth. So what if your attention span has been fragmented into nanoseconds if you measure your social life by Facebook friends, your professional worth, by Google hits, and the worst words you can imagine are airplane mode. We're all one marshmallow OCD narcissists granted by our devices the magic of comprehensive instant gratification of self-reinforcing worldviews, of control over the daily minutiae of our fates and fortunes. To not be irrevocably addicted to our smartphones would be senseless. It would be ridiculous. That being said, why is it that the essence of our app-mediated existence seems so eerily, bizarrely reminiscent of some of our most famous and enduring visions of dystopia? In Brave New World, for example, you'll recall that Huxley, you don't even have to have read it, just check it out on Wikipedia, like I did. Huxley invents a society where material consumption, genetically tailored education, good pharmaceuticals, and recreational sex keep everyone happy and in line. And in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, people are continuously entertained via wall-sized television screens, while books over time have become progressively shortened and condensed and finally by popular demand are burned so that their ideas don't offend anyone. Both novels, and here you can actually add 1984 to the list, portray the intentional simplification of complex and ambiguous ideas dumbing down in our own dumbed-down parlance, communicated relentlessly through advanced technologies as central to how societies anesthetize themselves, achieve material satisfaction, and come to be passively dominated by authoritarian regimes. Of course, in our real world, the regime is the marketplace, working its inexorable logic through the miracle of technological innovation and the opiate of individualized consumption. To barely a metaphor, really, who needs Huxley's Soma, giving everyone what they want is the ultimate drug? And there are no authoritarian big brothers to blame. We do this, we tell ourselves voluntarily and exuberantly through the pursuit of novelty, of convenience, entertainment, and approval. We're expressing ourselves. What our dystopian master storytellers did not foresee is that the threat from technology is not universal and deadening conformity, but quite the contrary, it's universal and deadening individuality. But of course, ultimately we find out what our collective identity really amounts to. The hundreds of millions of individualized generating nodes, each known to itself as me, mostly matter to the logic of our world. Because they add up to what is quaintly known as big data, among whose chief beneficiaries are the companies that use the data to personalize their marketing in a virtuous feedback loop that makes them more money and makes you want to keep on keeping up. And then there's the security state that's increasingly able to isolate, identify, and anticipate aberrant behavior among potential undesirables turning you into a predictable particle, but at least you're a safe particle. Old-fashioned civil libertarians and social conservatives make cavill about privacy and agency and responsibility and other abstractions, but fuck them, the market's free, information is free, and we're each made free through well-informed consumer choice. And so our personalized technologies delivered through the marketplace reinforce and gratify an obsession with the individual where we all get to live in our own call of information and stimulation and positive reinforcement, our own little narcissphere. Nothing can be worse for civil society than a culture where everyone feels like they can get whatever they want whenever they want it. From the one-percenters and the disappearance of social mobility to the continued dissolution of political civility and the political gridlock over pretty much everything and every issue presenting itself today and the resulting public discourse that collapses complex ideas into bite-size tweets, we're seeing an erosion of the overarching social cohesion that makes it possible for democracies to function. Now if our smartphones aren't the cause of that, they're certainly resonant co-conspirators as they compel our continual, devoted attention, isolating us from one another while stripping our cognitive landscapes of an appreciation of the necessity and yes, even the virtue of ambiguity, unpredictability, risk, conflict and compromise. Let me just end with a one-minute recounting of a different travel tale. This is in 1983 when I went to Manila and the Philippines for the first time, having no idea what I was facing. I stayed in a hellhole of a V&B the first night I was there. I wandered through the streets, lost, completely dazed and confused by the chaos of a third world city that I had no ability to prepare for and I can say it was one of the two or three most important days of my entire existence precisely because of that. And to rob ourselves of that is to rob ourselves of the potential of the authenticity of encounter with the real world that surrounds us. Thanks very much. Dan, you're gonna get our first yellow card of the evening for calling my vacation experience pathetic. Thank you for that. And now arguing against the motion, we start off with Miriam Warren. I think all of you out there have smartphones for one major reason and that's because they're awesome. This resolution does not contend that smartphones are merely affecting our lives but rather that they're hijacking them, that they're doing more harm than good. But don't be fooled. To affirm this resolution you must not only agree that smartphones are affecting our lives but they're hurting our lives. In preparation for this debate, I solicited some stories from real life people, a few of which I contacted on my smartphone. One of them told me a story about how she had carried on a long-distance relationship from London to Portland, Oregon for more than two years that wouldn't have been possible without her smartphone and the requisite apps like Skype that allowed her to keep in touch with her boyfriend that is now her husband. Another told me about how she went wedding dress shopping with her best friend, though they lived in two different hemispheres and there are only two different hemispheres so they lived in different hemispheres and they went wedding dress shopping together not only with pictures but she was able to actually set up her smartphone so that she was there in real time as her best friend tried on these dresses as though she were sitting in the room with her best friend's sister and cousin. Another friend who has watched her 13-year-old nephew grow up on Instagram because for the last five years she's been living outside of the US and he lives in Washington state. Another that told me a recent power outage in Bondi in Sydney, Australia prompted her to figure out what she could do without electricity which she realized was nothing except forget on her smartphone and send a tweet to Oscarid who sent her a message back within 30 seconds telling her that the power would be back in 20 minutes and that she could be updated through their system if she wanted to. She actually told me that she loved this because although she could experience the serendipity of life and forget about her work and go to the beach she actually wanted to know when it was gonna come back on so she could take a shower. And finally my own story which is of my grandmother. I haven't lived in the same city as my grandmother more than 15 years. We've never written letters to each other so we mostly relied on the phone until she recently got a Facebook account. For a couple of years on Facebook she actually went under my grandfather's name so rather than using her own name she went under his name and she didn't upload a photo. After a lot of prodding I told her that she didn't actually have to upload her own photo but that I would send her a photo that I thought was very sort of evocative of her personality of a large great dain and a small little girl smiling at the great dain. My grandmother's favorite dog are great dains. The thing I've learned about my grandmother that I don't think I would ever know without Facebook is that she is an absolutely hilarious writer because we've never exchanged letters before and only talked in voice to voice. This relationship has actually been completely extended by Facebook. She's actually the one person I look forward to seeing update and like my posts she writes me paragraphs to every status update and sends me private messages which occasionally get through to me and other times I have to write to her telling me that she sent me a blank page but still I laugh. And so maybe our screen time is increasing but I think that screen time is increasing because we're using it on people that we care about on things that we care about and yes even to document our meals and our trips and the places that we've seen I can't tell you the number of places I've seen through Instagram and Facebook and Twitter pictures places I may never have the chance to go to but because I know so many people who have been there I feel like I'm there as well. Now if we are to think that smartphones are doing more harm than good we must first think about what good they are actually doing for us. Smartphones are the Swiss army knives of our generation we use them to find out the weather to hail calves to schedule appointments to keep up with friends and family through tweets and pokes and pictures and posts. We use them to make price comparisons more than 40% of all smartphone users have used their devices to compare prices before making a purchase and who doesn't like a bargain. But can a smartphone save your life? From a first aid app for the iPhone that'll teach you how to make a bandage and a tourniquet to one that'll help you identify whether paw marks you see in the wild belong to a bear or not to yet another that detects any irregularities in heartbeat and informs you through a series of beeps. The role of smartphones in our lives is now well beyond simple talking and texting even FEMA is using social media in its disaster planning. Those who affirm this resolution may seek to frame the smartphone debate in first world terms that this is a rich white issue but smartphones are not some high class problem. In fact, social media and smartphones have allowed people in poor countries to collaborate for change in ways that would have been impossible a decade ago. In a post on TechCrunch, John Evans predicted last year that in five years time most sub-Saharan Africans will have smartphones. While staggering, that doesn't even begin to talk about the impact that that can have on commerce, coordination and community building there. Technology is happening whether we like it or not. This is the same question that gets asked every generation. The people asking this question are lamenting the loss of the old afraid of embracing the new rather than participating, they assign moral judgment. If you're sitting on the sidelines debating the pros and cons of technology in our lives you're missing the point. If you're debating that cars are too dangerous they'll pass you by while you're schlepping your things by horse and carriage. If you're debating whether a washing machine is going to hijack your life afraid that the devil's in the spin cycle you're missing the point. Arguably worse than debating the evils of technology is being left behind by the very thing you fear. Just as some people today might fear that smartphones are hijacking our lives people in the mid-1400s were concerned about the printing press and fearful of what it might mean if regular folks could share their ideas without the approval of monks. And the printing press is not the only technological innovation generations before us have feared. Phonographs were feared because critics claimed no one would read books anymore now that they could get audible entertainment from a machine. Telephones were feared because critics thought they'd empty out concert halls and churches or that the sounds inside them might make us deaf or crazy. Television was feared because people thought they could transmit personal conversations onto TV. Do we have the power over smartphones or do they have the power over us? Moralizing rather than actually participating doesn't get us anywhere. Parents who rail against the Beatles rather than stopping to listen to the music that's what this conversation feels like. If you're leading a comfy life changes jarring but I say get out your smartphones. Let's have some fun. Thank you. Just to update on the question that we had posed on the motion to get your input before the debate started. Those saying yes, the smartphones have hijacked our lives. We're 36%, those saying no, 64%. So we'll see how that stacks up with results at the end of the evening. And at the end of the evening the screen will come down and there'll be the full instructions on how to text answers. So now with a tough act to follow is Christine Rosen arguing in favor of the motion. I have a smartphone and I'm not afraid of it. However, I do have a few suggestions to make which will hopefully persuade you of the validity of this motion. One actually it's interesting that you told a story about Facebook, very heartwarming story of your grandmother and interacting with her on Facebook. It's just such a shame that you don't own those memories, Facebook owns those memories. And even now is likely target marketing great Dane food to your grandmother as we speak. So I wanna start, I want to say three things about smartphones hijacking our life. This is the first one. They claim the companies and the apps and Facebook and Google and Yelp all claim that these empower us. These are democratic technologies. Look at all the things we can do with them. And this is so much better than having the manager of a mediocre restaurant control things for you or the editor of a newspaper. I mean, isn't this good, right? It's democracy. But in fact, I would argue we're actually just switching one overlord for a new one. If you look at what Google, Facebook, Yelp, all these big companies, Amazon are doing, they're commodifying your life. And they're commodifying aspects of your life that didn't used to be commodified like your friendships and your relationships with your grandmother. They do that because they're businesses and they're in the business of making money. What they're trafficking in now is human emotion, human opinion, a lot of the things that we didn't have the ability to traffic in but that now we do. You are the product now. So that's one idea. So the control and choices that we're always being told that we have, which of course we do, we can turn off our smartphones or turn them on. But they only occur. You only have the choice to personalize your experience, to individualize your experience, to post your thoughts on any meal you've eaten. If you check that box, it says, I agree. I agree to the terms of service and no one reads the terms of service except Marvin who probably does read the terms of service and can explain them to you if you need him to. Chapter three of my book is on terms of service. See? See? But still, in order to have those relationships with our friends and family, we have to allow Google to scan our email. We have to allow Facebook to target us with ads and it's only going to increase as we move more of our interaction to our mobile devices. This is also by the way, not that democratizing when you look ahead a few years to what it's leading to and that's just some rather unequal treatment. If anybody knows about the real time bidding that goes on in the digital universe with ads, what you find is that if you happen to be looking for a nice vacation spot on Travelocity or Expedia, there's a real time bidding war going on for your attention online and your attention is being sold to the highest bidder who will then target you with particular ads. Now the more sites you visit and the more your behavior is tracked in database, the more granular that can become. And so as a result, you will see more and more of us getting better deals on certain things than other people. We're going to see different tiers of consumers because that's largely what we've become when we are online. And I think Eli Prizer's book about the filter bubble talks a little bit about this as well in terms of ideas, but it's happening in the consumer world and in the world of ideas. So that's one idea. The more you hear about being democratically empowered, the more you should think, did I have to check a box that said I agree? Because that doesn't quite square. The other thing I think it's doing is it is leading us to have too few undatabased experiences. And because the technology is there, it doesn't mean we should use it for certain things. Here's an example. I'll give you two examples of apps I've recently heard about. One just came out recently. It's called Lulu. And you'll like this Miriam. Their tagline is it's Yelp for boys. So what it does is if you're a registered Facebook user, you get onto your Facebook account and then you download the app to verify that you're female. Now of course, you creative men can dress up and make a false Facebook account and pretend to be female, but I'll leave that for you to do on your own. Anyway, the girls then can basically set up a Yelp-like rating system for any of the men in their lives. They're boyfriends, people they're interested in dating, and then they can all read each other's reader reviews of the men with hashtags like boring, cheap, expects you to listen to his bad music. I mean, it goes on and on. One of them is, is he a heartbreaker or a future husband? So beyond the whole issue of what it says about men and women in the 21st century, I asked, do we need these sorts of apps? Do we really need to have this kind of technology used for this purpose? I would argue no. Another app, which I actually just got when I was on my way here, is about to come to market. There are several of these already, and it tracks women's menstrual cycles. Again, if you're a self-tracker, self-quantifier, great, but really, is this necessary? They expect a broad audience for this among men and women. Okay, so we need more on database experiences. We need to know that the claims to empower users are somewhat a loser if you start looking at the companies that are dominating the digital universe. Finally, there's the problem of we never look up, and that's how we've changed social space and how we're undermining face-to-face communication. And I think it's great that we're all here. It's true, Andre said, we might as well have Skyped our presences in for this occasion, and I do think that once you make something automatic, convenient, and easy, and put it in your pocket, you're gonna do it more. You're gonna check it more, you're gonna look down more, and I do think we're starting to see a kind of weird new digital bystander effect where in public space, instead of looking around, instead of looking up on the bus and seeing who's around us, we're like this. And so that even when we travel to new places, we have a bubble around us of our known universe. So we are much more closely connected, in real time, to all the people we know and love. But we're less connected with our immediate surroundings and open to the kind of experiences that I think do make us deeply human. And I'm plugged in, and this is ironic. So our final opener here will be from Marvin and Maury. Thanks. So I planned on simply listening to the other side and trying to rebut some of the arguments that I heard. And I had to take lots of notes because there were lots of different arguments coming. So I think I've got six different classes of arguments. And we should just keep in mind, all of us have smartphones. If you've been persuaded so far to not use your smartphone tomorrow or the day after, or to give away your smartphone, then you've been persuaded, or to use it less. But the arguments that I see have been unpersuasive to me so far. So there's a whole set of arguments that the phone makes this OCD, narcissistic, dumbs us down. I'm not sure there's much evidence for that. I mean, I remember life before the internet. And it was awful. Life before the internet was a terrible place. It was, I mean, I grew up in Michigan and you had to drive everywhere. And everyone hung out at shopping malls all the time. And you couldn't find cool music until you heard it on the radio and there was nothing but pop music on the radio. So you had to go to some obscure record store. If you were cool enough, they'd talk to you. And it was this awful experience. And TV was terrible. There was no good TV. We're in the golden age of TV because now it's not simply advertising supported. You have Netflix. You have other ways for people to pay for really good TV. And back then it was just this boring, dreary childhood in Michigan where you could get one newspaper, one local news that just had different things in your cupboard that could kill you. And I just remember reading books all the time and getting them from different libraries. Now if you're a kid and I spent some time in Nebraska and I remember talking to a kid and I was like, how are you not bored here? And he says, I have an iPad. So I mean, and it's not just being bored. You can read the news. You can keep in touch with people who have his interests far away. And it's just the sort of idea that before smartphones we were less OCD or less narcissistic. I mean, if you were watching TV in the 80s or 90s, you were exposed to family ties and those other shows that might have made you narcissistic. And so the general sort of argument is hard to pinpoint. So then there's sort of a broad argument against markets in general. I'm a fan of markets, both on the right and the left. There's Milton Friedman arguing for markets and freedom. Amartya Sen on the left, I'm just a fan of markets. And so if smartphones make markets more efficient, I think that's great. The fact that I have Uber and I don't have to use the local cab company, I think is great and that I can compare prices. I mean, I'm a fan of markets in general versus other forms of economic governing. And so then we have the problem of advertising. That's something that was discussed quite a bit. The problem that your activity will be marketed to. For a long time, newspapers are supported by advertising, TV supported by advertising. And if you want a free Google experience, then you have advertising. If you want Facebook to be free, you need advertising. Just a question of business model. Do you wanna pay for Facebook or do you want it for free? And you don't mind those annoying little ads that you don't click on very often. And so I don't find it that problematic. But, and if you don't want it, there are options, right? There are social networks that have less advertising that are a little more private and you can choose among them. So the question of terms of service. Chapter three of my book is about terms of service and about free speech in terms of service. And it turns out that a lot of the speech platforms you use, Twitter, for example, they think of themselves as the New York Times of the 20% tree. Their terms of service are very pro user, very pro free speech. You can read them, you can read my book about, the chapter that includes them. A lot of these companies have very, they feel very strongly about users' free speech experience. And Google, obviously, they have whole teams that work on free speech around the world. They might not be as comforting on consumer privacy when they wanna target ads to you. But again, that doesn't bother me as much. So the terms of service, if you actually read them, very little of your data is actually being handed over to Dropbox and they're very broad and pro free speech on the platforms that we tend to use. And then, as for the Yelp for boys and all the other apps that are problematic, I mean, it's a general purpose technology. It's a Swiss Army knife. The ads that you've seen for Apple are, there's an app for it. Anything you want, there's an app for it. And so you could argue that, oh, a car is problematic as it could be a getaway car. It doesn't mean that cars are problematic in general or worse off for society. You could say, I watched the basketball game and it was really boring. Doesn't mean all basketball games are boring. There's just one app that's problematic. And you can use other apps. And then the issue about, and then this one, this one sort of hits home, the lack of face-to-face that when you're in a public setting, you might not see other people around you. You might be focused on your phone. I like people that I communicate with on my phone more than I like strangers I haven't met yet, generally. And thankfully, I'm not a very attractive girl. But if I were an attractive girl, I wouldn't want random strangers walking up to me and talking to me all the time. Every attractive girl I've seen, including my girlfriend, always has her phone to her face so people don't talk to her and earphones in. And sometimes people want to be private in a public space. And so I don't mind that at all. And so I, in fact, encourage it. But people have a choice. You can just sort of nod at someone if you want to talk to them. And so in terms of all of the arguments that have been made, I don't find any compelling. And there's a reason why we use our smartphones. They're remarkable. They've changed my life from that bored Detroit child to someone who can read any newspaper in the world, get any book instantly, and communicate with anyone I want in the world without even having to go home and pick up the phone or ask my mom for permission. So that's enough. Lots to chew over. Thank you, Marvin, for that, your rendition of your childhood might have been more pathetic than my rendition of my vacation. Out, out. So we have half an hour here to mix it up and I apologize in advance if I cut people off to keep things moving. But I wanted to turn to you, Dan, and what do you have to say about young Marvin at age 10 in Michigan with his dreary life? Why would you want to deprive him of the smartphone? Well, I think that the idea that we can look from, I mean, your life may have been dreary, but the idea that everyone was miserable because they were anticipating the smartphones that they couldn't have seems rather absurd. And in fact, I think we actually have pretty strong evidence from survey work that's subjective quality of life, people's own views of how they're doing haven't changed over time in this country. So all of the increasing wealth and all of the increasing technological wizardry has not really influenced our own view of how well we are doing and how satisfied we are with our lives. So we do know that we're more sedentary and we're fatter. And so it used to be, I guess you were in Detroit, so you weren't farming in Nebraska or something. So I don't know why you couldn't go down to the news store and buy a newspaper from another country. You could certainly do that in the town I grew up in. So it seems to me that this is all kind of a retrospective view of how hellish, nasty, brutish, and short life was before smartphones, but I don't really remember missing them at the time. Do you have any questions or further challenges to what you heard so far? Sure, so it seems to me that the position, Miriam, your position, wasn't that our lives haven't been hijacked by smartphones. It was that, all right, our lives have been hijacked by smartphones, right? So you used the sort of whether we like it or not phrase and you had a vision of history that hapless academics like me call technological determinism where it's all happening and we just got to climb on board and go. So I don't think you're disagreeing with the premise, you just think it's cool. Right? Well actually I think it is that this word hijack suggests harm and we don't believe that. We think they are affecting our lives. They're definitely changing our lives. We think it's happening for the good. And I think- Would you say your grandma has hijacked your life for the better? If she has, I welcome it. Well it's more than harm or it's more complicated than harm. It's also whether or not one actually has choice and you suggested, in fact, your whole story was no choice. We're swept along by this tide of technological change over which we have no agency and no control and that's good. That was kind of the story I heard and that anyone who would resist it is a Luddite and a no-nothing and you wouldn't think that printing presses were good or automobiles were good and so- Lucky whips are. Lucky whips are. Well you can't both be swept along and could resist it. I think she was saying you shouldn't resist it because you have a choice. That's what I heard. What's your choice? Well no, the words he used weren't, it's to me suggested that the point was get with the program, it's cool. So if the argument is that hijack means, hijack's our life for the better then I would be over there. And I would be arguing that yes, at hijack's our life for the better. I assume that hijack meant bad, not good because she wouldn't say her grandmother, like my niece is very cute and adorable and I wouldn't think of her as having hijacked my life for the worse. I think it has enriched it. I was surprised that none of you did the classic sort of high school debating thing of bringing out the Merriam-Webster definition of hijack, which, but you're right, hijacking doesn't tend to have many positives. She hijacked my heart. Connotation. If that's what's going on, we can switch sides. But let me ask, so Merriam, let me ask you, it was a very touching, cool story about your grandmother and it sounded like she wasn't necessarily the most keen to get online, but once she did you learned more about her on Facebook and had a different relationship with her as she sort of flourished and came into her own on Facebook, but does it bother you at all to the point that Christine made that all of these archives belong to Facebook Inc, not you or her and that this insight about her affinity for Great Danes is being monetized somewhere somehow? I mean, I'd rather have her get an ad about great tame dog food than the ones I get on how many pounds I need to lose that I don't think I relate to anything I'm doing. You know, I think I'd rather take the experience. You know, obviously there are ways I could export that data to myself so that I can keep it if I want to, but I think the thing that really brings me the joy is when I open it up and I unexpectedly get this note from her that is like, totally ridiculous. She hears that I'm in Copenhagen and writes me about if I've met anyone interesting on the plane that might be marriageable material. I mean, that's just- You had your ear buds in and you weren't letting anyone approach you. How could you meet the friend? I actually met a really wonderful 50-year-old woman on the plane yesterday from San Francisco to here. I gotta say it was pretty awesome. Marvin, take note. People next to you that you haven't met might be just as interesting as the people you're communicating with on your smartphone. If they look interesting, I'll put my smartphone away and start talking to them. Well, soon you'll have scanning technology that will then read out for you their facial features, you know. If I had Google Glass and could tell if they were a friend to my friends, I would do that. I mean, so when I- Hey, Google Glass is fighting words. We cannot go there. When I meet someone online, I know a lot about them, more than I know about them when I sit next to them at a coffee shop. Why is that good? I love it, because I know if they have friends in common with me, I know what they're interested in. I can Google them and find information about them and who their friends are. And if that's interesting, then that's a lot of information that's helpful for me when I might know a connection that I wouldn't otherwise know. You're assuming that what Google says about you is who you really are and ask anyone who's had anything negative or false written about them that is still on Google or Wikipedia, if that's the case. So it's not benign, great, oh, yippee, I can learn all this information. For some people, it's actually harmful, misleading, and downright slanderous. That's happened, that's rarely come up and it's better than having no information from my point of view. So, Christine, let me press you a little bit on this question of Miriam's grandmother who's playing a starring role tonight. Thank you. I meant to send her the link. I don't know if she's gotten the video done yet. They are royalties or something. But, you know, a lot of people, Christine spent hours, certainly a week, maybe even a day on Facebook. And it's one of the most important outlets that they have and activities and it's free. It's free because the business model, it's free to them because the business model, as Marvin pointed out, is advertising based, not unlike good old broadcast television, which people can also spend hours a day enjoying for free. If I am okay with major corporations knowing that my grandmother loves Great Danes and targeting ads to her, like what is the harm? And what, isn't that a transaction that I should freely be able to enter into? And I think a lot of people would, wouldn't you agree that a lot of people would prefer that model and enjoy this for free and give away their data? I mean, is there some huge pitfall down the road that most of us are not aware of? Well, yes. I mean, I think technically it's free, but there's always a cost. And so I would say there's cost on two levels. We don't know in the future what will be done with that data. There's a reason that Facebook bought the top Israeli facial recognition scanning technology firm. I mean, their plans are a much broader than just connecting you to your grandma. And what they are, we don't know. What they, but if you look at what their leaders of the company say. So what could they be? I mean, are you envisioning some Orwellian? Mark Zuckerberg is gonna sort of rip off a mask and become dictator of the world? I mean, what's the... I don't know. What's the terrible end game here? Well, this is the thing. We don't know. We don't know what the end game is. Now to the question of, but I think there's a sort of existential cost here that no one wants to talk about. This is a qualitative, not a quantitative issue at stake, which is what does Facebook do to friendship? What does it do to the meaning of connection? What does it mean that we all now have to perform ourselves online, moment by moment, day by day, it's exhausting. Talk to a 13 year old who's grown up with Facebook. Some of them love it. Others are sort of saying, we're not gonna do this every day. There's a sort of existential risk to a lot of these technologies that I think we don't like to talk about because it's not quantitative. It's not data, we don't have data on it. We're starting to get an interesting and complex look at how this affects particularly the young. I mean, there's a recent study by Cliff Nass at Stanford who looked at how long teen girls, tween girls spent online versus in face-to-face conversation and the ones who spent, and they were Skyping. I mean, this is not, they weren't just passively looking at the television screen. They're Skyping and looking at the computers while they do their homework. The ones who had more face-to-face interaction with a human being, not on Skype because they were multitasking and not really looking. The ones who had a more face-to-face time, particularly with their parents, were much less at risk for all the behaviors we worry about tween girls having, self-image issues, depression. So I think there are quantitative issues which we can talk about. We certainly can talk about advertising whether people wanna sign on for that sort of thing. I think they're signing on in a very ambiguous, for a very ambiguous future. I think what they're signing on for now is not necessarily what the future will be. But I think there's also a qualitative question that we should try to get at because we do all use this technology. And hijacking, a hijacker can take a plane. That plane might still fly later, but while the hijacker's in charge, the plane is not functioning the way it was meant to, which is to peacefully carry people from one point to the other. So the question is, when we're walking around with our phones, we can use them like that airplane, peacefully, and use them to connect to people, but we can also be hijacked in the sense that it can take us away from moments that we should be having. Marvin, have you taken a break from your smartphone in the last year? I mean, I'm not consciously, but I don't check it all the time. I mean, have you gone, say, 24 hours where you've been totally cut off? No, I'm not sure why I would want to be. I mean, I, so I read my news generally through Twitter. I check my email occasionally. And in fact, because I have my smartphone with me, is why I can take a break from the rest of the world. I can go to Miami for a few days and no one knows I'm gone, because I can check my email, and I can go on. People never took vacations before. Except for Google, all over the place. No, not saying people, but I couldn't have easily taken a vacation when I took this vacation, had I have to be present. So the expectations would have been different. The expectation would have been you were on vacation. All right, fine. So smartphones have neither hijacked my life, nor for the better or the worse. Have you been unplugged for any considerable period of time in recent years? I mean, I can't have. Camping or a conscious break. I haven't been camping in a few years either, so I know on that one. But I think I agree with Marvin that I haven't really wanted to. I think the other piece is that there are ways in which my digital life is sort of broken out, and I feel like I can take a break from, say, my work email, but still get to catch up on the articles in my flipboard, which I want to do. So I don't feel like I... I was wondering if either of you have experienced that and grappled with perhaps some of the benefits that come from taking such a break. I mean, it's interesting that I just read an article, I think it was in the New York Times recently, about how in Silicon Valley and in San Francisco, kind of the heart and soul of all of these new technologies, there's a big trend now, or anything that's in New York Times assumes it's a big trend, but there's a trend of people organizing these evenings that are meant to be, you know, you're untethered, you're supposed to check your smartphone at the door and socialize in the old fashioned way of actually looking at people in the eye and communicating. And this seems to resonate with people, the need to go back to person to person communication and doesn't that say something about some of the dangers or, you know, the cost associated, the cost that Christina was talking about in terms of our reliance with having most of our relationships now be with the screen and not with the human being in front of us? I don't think my life lacks personal communication. I think I actually have lots of communication in real life with people all over the world that I can sustain relationships with and manage and be part of a team with that would have never been possible before. So in the in-between times we do talk on Skype and then I fly to Copenhagen and we ride bikes together. I think that wouldn't have been possible before. I have a team that spans from Singapore and Australia all the way to Poland and Turkey and a lot of stuff in between, including people that sit right next to me in San Francisco. So I don't think this has reduced the amount of personal interactions that I have and I think it doesn't mean that you can't have rules on it. I certainly wouldn't go on a date with anyone that texted in front of me and that would just be a rule that I would let them know about, you know? But I also would be fine if we both want to check in on Yelp before we start the meal or if we both wanted to take a picture and post it to Instagram. I think it's all about the kind of rules that you negotiate in your own relationships and what you're okay with. You took some issue with the way in which Dan characterized what you were saying about, you know, yes, it's, Dan was suggesting that your case was, yes, these technologies have hijacked our lives, you know, you might as well enjoy it. But you took issue with that. So are you suggesting that this is something that we're all opting into and that it's perfectly feasible to not be a part of this smartphone hijacked life? I mean, I know people who don't have smartphones. I mean, I think- How would you know? No, it's good. It cannot be found. I think, I take issue particularly with the idea that I would be a technological determinist. I think this is the side of technological determinism that it's sweeping people away and nothing can be done about it and they're being hijacked without them knowing. I mean, hijacked, in a sense, says no power. Like you can't do anything when the hijacker is there with a gun to your head. What I'm saying is that I think these things have freed us up. I think that I have many more opportunities than I had as a little kid growing up in Las Vegas, which might sound very glamorous, but really wasn't in the 1980s. And my first- It was no Detroit. The Detroit was awful. I mean, life before the internet, I mean, sure you could maybe go to a news store and get expensive international news stories, but you couldn't like have your friends tweeting you interesting stories. You couldn't have fine blogs. You just couldn't find like normal content that you'd think of as normal today. You'd get newspapers and expensive international papers and just a few channels. It was really bland. That explains why the world isn't so much better shaped today than it was back then. I will say, I grew up in Mexico and I remember going to, not in Cancun by the way, a very different part of Mexico, but I remember going to this one store that had where you could buy like two, three week old Thai magazines and that was very exciting. I mean, but that was the lag that we had to wait and they were very expensive to your point. Dan, let me turn to you and I was thinking about your trip to Manila in 83. And when was the last time you went to an exotic place like that for the first time? So more recently, when was the most recent trip you took to somewhere exotic? Okay, where did you go? Liles and Cambodia. Liles and Cambodia. That's about as exotic as it gets. Did you do research online before going? Absolutely. Okay. So isn't that a contradiction of your stance here this evening? Well, I mean, why, if you wanted to recreate one of the greatest experiences of your life of going to the Philippines in 83 and enjoying the serendipity of not having all this advanced knowledge, why now with these empowering technology? I mean, it sounds like you're now relying on these empowering technologies. Sure, I mean, so, you know, partly the debate format makes it impossible to talk about some of the ambiguities of this. And obviously there's great things about smartphones. I do think it's a mistake to go from the particular, you know, this app is good and this is bad and you can choose between them as if that says anything about the kind of broad systemic implications. But you know, I'm an 11 year old kid. I have a spouse. We plan to vacation. It's very different than when you're by yourself and you're going someplace for the first time and it's an adventure. So, but I do think something's lost. I do think it was a less adventurous vacation than one we could have had 20 years ago doing the same thing. We still would have researched it. I still would have been concerned about my kid's well-being and wanting to make sure that we had the right vaccines and all this other stuff. But I actually do think it's a less engaged, a less authentic engagement with spontaneity and the unknown and it's a trade-off. So, you know, partly you guys like it more than we like it, but you know, we don't hate it and you acknowledge there's some problems, right? I think they're real- Not gonna have a group hug. Yeah, no, no, no, no. So, we can do a group tweet though. But the point is that I think we wanna, on our side, wanna suggest that just like cars are great except they kill 40,000 people a year and they warm the climate. You know, smartphones are great, but we ought to be aware of the fact that they also change very profound things about the way we organize our world in ways that we should be cognizant of. And you're totally right there. There is a lot of ambiguity. There's something to the nature debate that is forcing simplification. But taking into account all of that ambiguity and the pros and the cons on either side, and in this case, the pros of these technologies being able to know, you know, research a little bit more about your trip in advance. Taking all of the pros and cons into account, are you positing that we'd still all be better off if you had not been able to access that if we didn't have these smart cars? No, I'll just personalize it because I don't, you know, it's still all better off. I don't know how one would assess that. I would say that if we had done the same trip 20 years ago, it probably would have been a more, an exciting and mysterious trip than it was. And I'm also, I'm thinking about your, you argued that with these technologies, we no longer need creative pickup lines of bars. And I'm not sure how that works. There's another one. I don't know. We can have a sidebar later on that. A sidebar. You also said that they've conceded that there are some downsides to these technologies. I'm not sure I've heard that much of a concession on the downsides. What, which ones are? We can choose, you know, if there's apps we don't like, we don't have to, we don't have to do them. So maybe they haven't conceded that. But, you know, certainly part of this just simply comes out as, as, you know, it's subjective, which do you like and which do you not like. I mean, I, is there any, can we pull the audience? So, who would like to be less dependent on email? Who feels that email significantly influences their life in ways it adds to their stress and makes it difficult to opt out? Okay, so it's not a trivial. A lot of people raise their hands. Consequence. Who would like to type out their memos and fax them to other people instead of email? We didn't complain that we didn't have email. We just did it. Is it the, is that the fault of email as a technology or is it the fault of these people who are just addictive personalities, A-type, you know, who just need to chill out and step back from it? Well, the obstacles to communication have been, have been dropped to zero. So that any trivial thing, I mean, we all experience them. Emails don't stress people out. People stress people out. Let's see, let's see this, I know, I mean, we're circling around this idea that, oh, the technology's neutral. You can just choose. And I think you could say that early on when the cell phone was like 10 times the size and as heavy as a brick. Yeah, you could choose to walk around with that thing. Now I think, I mean, try, I know a friend who, because he doesn't have a very big presence on Google, when perspective dates Google and they freak out. It's like, he's not on Google. Who is he? Who is this guy? Or if you, you know, for example, try to buy an airline ticket that's not online. It's difficult. So I think one of the things that Dan's pointing at is it's not just a free choice because technology structures, society in a way, often without our direct ability to vote on it till after the fact. And I think we're getting to that point with a lot of the smartphone technology, the mobility, its ability to track you. For example, I mean, all those lovely Instagram prints, I mean, you can GPS coordinate where you are. And while there are great benefits to that, I think we don't like to talk about the cost because Americans love technology we always have. And I think it's moving quickly enough now that we need to think about the broader ways that structures society without our choice. Whether that's through the corporations that own proprietary algorithms that determine which restaurant we might like or whether that's whether we want to have our kids on Facebook when they're 12, even though they're supposed to be, the law says they should be older. So it's not neutral. It really isn't neutral. Marvin, do you think we are cognizant enough of the costs that come with these technologies? I mean, I think so. So we've been using this car analogy, right? I mean, it's hard to opt out of the car if you live in certain areas. Cities have been designed in a way where like you might need a car if you live in Detroit or Lincoln, Nebraska. And I don't think that you can simply say, look, there's one cost, you sort of have to balance the cost and the benefit and make a weighing. And when it comes to smartphones, sure there might be hard to opt out of email. There are certain ways to do it. I only reply to email generally once a day if I can. So just sort of to find a way to sort of manage all of my email. But I think people are cognizant of the costs. I think people can manage that. And I mean, one of the ways that, so not only has the smartphone world made us more available for email, there's also changed sort of the way we think about lots of things. Changed as the way people think about, you know, what a teacher is or what expertise is. There was a time when, you know, you sort of thought of expertise as something the New York Times did, not something that a blogger, you know, who's an expert could do or, Nate Silver, right? Nate Silver comes from the internet, comes from Daily Coast, and his predictions- I think he probably was born of a human, but that can't be my guess. So he's Nate Silver of the internet. I mean, he was proven right over and over and over. Except during the Super Bowl. Except during the Super Bowl. But like when it came to political stuff, and the folks who were on TV when I was a kid, like the McLaughlin group, their predictions were wrong half of the time, right half the time. There was no accountability. And we always thought of them as experts. The internet comes along and now we can think of, hey, this guy who just crunches data, this nerdy guy, he's what an expert looks like. And he works for the New York Times. Now he does, now he does, now he does, now he does. But we've sort of changed and we changed what we think of as expertise. Think of Skillshare. Anyone can be a teacher. You can go to Skillshare.com. You can learn from anyone. And I actually think that changes the way we think about things and you could say, oh, we can't opt out of that mindset. That's actually a benefit. Okay, but can I just- Yeah, go ahead. This idea that we can learn from everyone is not something that technology has brought us. It's called being a human being. My grandmother taught me how to tie my shoes. I didn't need to go on YouTube and have someone do that for me. Now, if I didn't have a grandmother, I love the grandmother meme tonight. It's the hashtag grandma. But I mean, if I didn't have that, maybe I would like to have the opportunity. But I do think that that, I think a little bit of the technological determinism that you were mentioning earlier comes up here when you say, oh, everyone can teach each other anything. Can I do a hand thing? How many of you have learned something from YouTube? You've gone onto YouTube and you've got- Not about cats. Not about cats. You might not have had a grandmother to explain to you. So like, oh, this is convenient and easier than asking my grandmother or someone else. We do it all the time. It actually makes our lives better. It's not no different. No, but see, I think you're making an argument that it's superior to some of the other ways and that's where I would say- I do think it's superior, which is why we chose to use YouTube, that moment we chose YouTube instead of some other means that was still available to us. Couldn't it just be that it was easier and convenient and right in front of us and we didn't have to get our butts off the chair and walk down stairs and- That's what I mean by superior. I chose to do it because it was superior. I made a choice. But how many of us have- You're the one who's deciding what I think is superior. Why can't I make that decision for myself? I can choose this app or that app, YouTube or my grandmother. I tend to choose YouTube. Because your grandmother- Your grandmother's gonna be calling you. But how many of us have learned things online that turned out to be incorrect because of this culture of we can learn from everybody and they're not being these authoritative filters? But we also have those moments- How would you know? We always have those moments at dinner. Back when I was in Michigan, you'd be at dinner and someone would have a fact with some random rumor they heard and it would be wrong. They'd be saying it really authoritatively. Now you can just pull out your smartphone at dinner and learn the true facts. That's what I get. So all of us have learned false facts from each other as well as from YouTube. Again, where's the evidence that we're ruled by truth now compared to 20 or 30 years ago where it was just lies? In fact- You read the daily mail? The point is people lie. People get false information on YouTube or in real life. We're not really proving anything by saying how many of you've gotten false information on YouTube? We get false information in real life all the time. Yes, but the question is, what's the benefit? So it's convenient people use it. I mean, if that's inherently a benefit, okay, it's inherently a benefit. I think you probably get better information. Merriam, you've been very- I'm trying to get the best information too. Very scrupulous about not making this all about Yelp. But I actually wanna ask you to talk a little bit about how you first became a fan of Yelp as a user and to don't be shy about talking a little bit about Yelp as an example of what we're talking about and ways in which the hijacking might be more positive than we're suggesting with the motion. Yeah, well, Yelp was a site that was built in 2004 and started to build a community in 2005 in San Francisco. And from late 2005 to early 2007, before I became an employee, I wrote more than 1,000 reviews about restaurants in San Francisco and wineries in Sonoma and where I got my red cowboy boots in a place with a gilded gold calf at the door where people didn't speak English inside, Mexican cowboy stars are definitely the best place to get cowboy boots in case you're looking. I think when I think about Yelp, it's not only about the reviews of which we have more than 34 million now on the site across 20 countries, but it's also about this way that we've brought people together. And some of my best friends are actually people I met on Yelp as a user in 2005, 2006, before I became an employee. And we are helping to facilitate those relationships all the time in more than 100 cities across the world through community managers who host events that are happening in real life. So these aren't people behind the screens. They're people who get together for latte art making classes to help each other on a community service project to have a dance party with 80s costumes. And like I said, these are happening everywhere. I saw it twice last week in Copenhagen and also in London. And it's kind of amazing. I don't know if 20 years ago, a person like me would have ever had access to someone in New York City coming from Las Vegas, much less someone in Copenhagen or Warsaw or Istanbul. And I think when I think about Yelp, it's about not only the democratization of information so that regular people whose pictures aren't in the kitchen when they go to a restaurant can have as great an experience as someone who is a critic and does, but that it's also about bringing people together around shared interests. And I think it's cool if you wanna get together around an interest which might be taco trucks or might be the fact that you have a baby that's six months old. And I think we're doing a lot of that. And I think it's pretty interesting stuff and I'm proud to work on it. Great, thank you. I think we are now ready for our closing arguments and we're now gonna start with this side of the aisle, the team arguing against the motion. And each of us are gonna have two minutes and then we'll wrap up. So Miriam, you wanna go first? People go with Marvin first. Marvin? Okay. I thought you were going first. Oh, I'm gonna go first. Okay. Shall I come up there? Oh, yes. Okay. We've had a lot of talk about my grandmother tonight, which I didn't expect and I look forward to calling her, she's not on Skype, I don't think, to tell her about it tomorrow. You know, there's certainly been discussion about whether the information that we have and share with one another is actually ours. But I think when I look at this resolution and I think about all of the things that we've talked about here tonight, the thing that it really, my mind really comes back to is these experiences. And though they are tendered online and though they may happen through Instagram or Twitter or Skype or on my smartphone or on my MacBook Air, I think the thing that really comes out for me is that experiences aren't something you can hold onto necessarily and tuck away in a trunk or file away in a cabinet. They are very fleeting. And what I'm thankful for is the opportunity to have those experiences with people that I love who live thousands and thousands of miles away from me that I would never have the chance to experience with through any other means, but through my smartphone and through all of these different types of technologies. And so I think that a vote against this motion is really one that says these devices are doing more good to you than harm. That they're actually opening your life to a whole bunch of things that weren't possible before. And I know that certainly Las Vegas wasn't Detroit because I've never been there, but I can say that my world opened up when I got access to the internet at about 14 years old that suddenly it was much beyond this desert place that I lived in where no one in my family had been to university. And suddenly the world was available to me. And I think that that has only continued as I've been able to have more and more access to reach out to people all over the world to know things that would not have been possible before. And so is the smartphone hijacking our lives? It's not hijacking mine. I think it's making it a lot better. And I think for a lot of people around me, including my grandmother, whom I haven't seen in real life in a really long time, it's a pretty good thing. Thank you. Christine? I think when you think about voting, the question isn't whether you're better off now than you were before your smartphone. I think the question should be what kind of experiences are you having on most days versus what kind of experiences could you be having if you had a little more awareness about what your smartphone can and can't do for you? And aren't there some experiences that maybe, not if your friends and family live thousands of miles away, but if you had something to say to your colleague, you got up and walked and looked in the eye and told that to them, maybe they look a little distraught. You could start a conversation. Maybe figure out if there's something you could do to help them instead of just sending them an email or a text. So I think when it comes down to it, it's true that technology is an expression of our humanity. But human nature sometimes has some negative impulses that it likes to indulge as well as positive ones. So when we think about smartphones, and yes, the term hijacked has come up a lot, I would encourage you to think about whether or not the daily experience of your everyday life, when you talk to one another, when you walk down the street, has that been dramatically improved by a technology whose promise is actually to increase the mediation of your everyday experience, not to just expand your connections to each other? So in closing on the motion, I mean there was some confusion about the motion at some point where it wasn't clear if hijacked meant hijacked for good or for bad. So I think if you don't feel hijacked by your smartphone in a bad way, you feel that you have agency and can control your smartphone, and then you should definitely vote on our side. And being a lawyer, you try to sort of focus on the key argument and rebut it in a closing rebuttal. But there have been so many different arguments that it's sort of hard to keep track. And from what I can tell, you've been accused of with your smartphone becoming OCD, narcissistic, lacking social cohesion for democracy, being dumbed down. So I'm not used to the kind of argument that insults you in many different ways to try to persuade you. But I don't think that's, I'm guessing that hasn't happened to you. If you feel that has happened to you, then please don't vote for our motion. And I think most of the arguments against the awesomeness of the smartphone. The smartphone, there's a reason why there's more mobile phones in America than there are people. More than half of those are smartphones. There's a reason why Apple's the most valuable company in the world is because people love their smartphones and they have them. And all of the sort of quibbling on the edges, I think doesn't address, it's a very provocative thesis, but it hasn't been backed up, I don't think at all. And one of the sort of issues that sort of comes to me is not everyone sits down next to me and I can have a sort of conversation with them face to face. A lot of people that I've collaborated with that I've gotten to know, I've only skyped with them, right? I've only seen them on a screen or I don't see them nearly as often as I do on a screen. And I wouldn't get on a plane and fly to go see them. Be bad for the environment, bad for global warming. And it would be really expensive. And a lot of my experience has been enriched as a result of my being able to be mediated with other people. Which actually gets to, one of the first things that people were talking about when the internet really became big in 1995 was how it created community. And there are lots of communities that couldn't be possible, couldn't be created without the internet. You had sort of a local community. But now you could have a community across America of kids who are interested in Quiz Bowl or something, who lived in rural areas. And so the fact that you could have community out of the internet, I think is actually the reason why smartphones are so popular. My wife is gonna, is watching, but she will be concerned that I'm getting the last word here. So a couple of quick points. The first is that the question here is not to condemn or extoll, but to discern. And obviously smartphones have value and there's reasons that people use them. But I also think there is confusion here in this discussion between the individual feedbacks that one gets, the rewards from individual use and the question of how society is restructuring itself around a completely different set of technological interactions in ways that we may or may not ultimately feel good about. And so part of the question on the table having to do with hijacking is whether or not you feel like you have sufficient agency in that process of social remaking, of social transformation. And so I think the point I wanna leave you with is it's not about whether you like this app or not or whether you can talk with your grandmother or not. It's whether or not the world that we're creating is the world that we want and that we think is moving us in the right direction. The continual complaints we hear about the dumbing down of political discourse, the need to make everything simple because no one has attention span or education to understand anything complex. These have very positive resonances and feedbacks with exactly the kinds of temptations that smartphones present to us. And so our suggestion is that in fact it's important to consider this critically and to consider the possibility that the world that we want is one that should not be one that we hand over to the evolution of this particular technology. Thank you. Thank you, thanks to the four of you for a spirited entertaining and enlightening exchange grandmothers and all and lots of talk of dating and where we're all from and that was very interesting. So the result of the poll before our debate closed at 42% of people who texted argued, polled for the motion. By the way, the irony that you have to text your vote, I'm just putting on the table and just... That's a little bit prejudiced. It's so convenient and wonderful, I love it. If you'd like to mail in your... Pass it to your pigeon, you know. We were gonna allow people to mail in their responses but the whole not getting Saturday delivery soon, that's just... The fix is in, that's all. So 42... Questions? So thank you, thank you. So I appreciate that comment and I encourage more of that after we're done here and also you can fill out cards for to continue this on Slate in the days to come. The poll before the debate, 42% registered their approval of the motion, 58% felt that no, smartphones had not hijacked our lives. Now, having heard the debate, do you believe smartphones have hijacked our lives? We are registering our votes on at the phone number 22333, so two twos, three threes. We're gonna put the instructions on the screen as well and if you say, if you will feel that yes, smartphones have hijacked our lives, having heard the debate, we need you to text FT333. And again, it's gonna be here and if you feel that no, text FT444 to that phone number and Adam, let's get that screen down, so it's... Okay. But I wanna thank all of you for coming tonight. Please stick around, have a refreshment. Talk to our great debaters and thanks again for coming. Thank you. Thank you.